The present invention relates generally to the field of service management, and more particularly to validating configuration and compliance of services.
Information technology (IT) service management (ITSM) is a process which aligns IT services (e.g., manages services) to businesses and can provide a focus on the delivery of best services to an end user. For example, ITSM can be utilized in a cloud infrastructure to provide various enterprise IT services to a customer or other types of end users. ITSM includes activities and services that are performed by an organization or part of an organization to plan, deliver, operate, and control IT services offered to customers. The activities and services are directed by policies and are organized and structured in processes and supporting procedures. For example, some managed services are governed by policies that manage validation of configuration and security compliance for the managed services. Security compliance is utilized to ensure that security risks, governance controls, and vulnerabilities are actively managed throughout the lifecycle of the managed services. Validation processes can be carried out utilizing a checklist that covers various verifications that correspond to a managed service.
IT infrastructure library (ITIL) is a set of practices for ITSM that focuses on aligning IT services with the needs of businesses. ITIL describes processes, procedures, tasks, and checklists which are not organization-specific but can be applied by an organization for establishing integration with the organization's strategy, delivering value, and maintaining a minimum level of competency. ITIL allows the organization to establish a baseline from which it can plan, implement, and measure. It is used to demonstrate compliance and to measure improvement.
It is known to validate domain name services (DNS) or other configuration data for multiple network services provided by a common multi-tenant application server by U.S. Pat. No. 8,566,449 by Guest et al., which teaches that the validation system suitably receives configuration data from the multi-tenant application server for each of the services provided. The validation system also performs a validation query to a domain name services or other public service on the network to obtain public data about each service. The publicly-available information is compared to the data received from the multi-tenant application server, and any anomalies are reported and/or repaired as appropriate.